Month: December 2020

By: LESLIE TAHA

The first thing that I have to say is that I am an African American man living in the Minneapolis area. I have to state this now; otherwise I would probably be called a racist.

Most people think that Black Lives Matter is a grass-roots, black created, black run organization dedicated to fighting racism. It most certainly is not. The Black Lives Matter movement is the creation of a group of a few very wealthy individuals, non-profit corporations, and the corporate media (incidentally, 90% of the U.S. media is controlled by only six corporations)

On the official Black Lives Matter website, BlackLivesMatter.com it states that Black Lives Matter is a global network foundation that is active in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. A global network!

Who funds Black Lives Matter? It’s funded by billionaires George Soros (Open Society Foundation), Rob McKay (Taco Bell heir), the Ford Foundation, the Borealis Philanthropy, the Democracy Alliance, and many others. Not exactly what I would call a black run grass-roots organization. If these facts alone don’t cause you to rethink the whole Black Lives Matter thing, then you just aren’t paying attention.

Black Lives Matter began in 2013 when the media suddenly started focusing a tremendous amount of attention on what they portrayed as the rise of unjustified, racially motivated killings of African American men by white police officers. That’s the way that the media portrayed it, but the facts say otherwise.

Are police shootings of African American men on the rise? No they are not. In fact they are on the decline. According to the Juvenile and Criminal Justice Report, the rate of police killings of African Americans has fallen by 70% over the last 40-50 years.

Are white racist police the biggest murderers of African Americans? No, far from it. The Black Lives Matter / media cabal is demonizing the police and portraying them as our number one foe, – the enemy, but the facts once again say otherwise.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, 2,925 African Americans were murdered in 2018. 89% of them (2,600) were murdered by other African Americans. That same year 209 African Americans (7%) were killed by the police (justified or otherwise).

So let’s do the math here. 2,600 African Americans killed by other African Americans and 209 killed by the police (justified or otherwise). So who is killing African Americans? Other African Americans. But who does the media put all of their focus on? The “white racist” police.

So here is the big question, seeing that these are the clear facts why is the media twisting the truth? Why are they pushing the false narrative that racism is rampant, (didn’t we just have an African American president for eight years)? Why are they spreading this lie that racially motivated police shootings are up. Why are they spreading this lie world-wide causing racial divisions, protest, rioting, looting, burning, destruction and death? This global cabal has a secret agenda and African Americans are just being used as pawns in their world-wide game.

This media produced false narrative reached its pinnacle with the death of George Floyd. The media has practically deified him. He’s in nationwide TV commercials, online ads, public service announcements, he’s on billboards (we are talking millions of dollars in advertising. Who’s paying for this?). His image is graffitied on buildings, businesses and walls from coast to coast, he’s on national magazine covers, and this list goes on and on. Hundreds attended his memorial service and funeral which included Al Sharpton (surprise!), The Governor of Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis, and many big name celebrities.

So who is this George Floyd? Is he some great civil rights leader like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela? No, – he was a violent career criminal with a long criminal record.

George Floyd was released from prison in Houston Texas in 2014 following an arrest for aggravated robbery. He had been in jail at least five other times. His arrest record included theft, drug possession, and criminal trespass. He was also the leader of a home invasion ring. They entered a woman’s home and Floyd threatened to kill her by pointing a gun at her stomach while they ransacked the place looking for drugs and money.

Nice guy huh. And this is the one that the Black Lives Matter / media cabal is using as their international poster boy. A violent career criminal. Well at least you can’t say that they don’t have a sense of humor.

On May 20th 2020 Floyd was arrested again for trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a Minneapolis grocery store. This was the event that supposedly set off this insane world-wide media storm. As we know, Floyd died while in police custody and the four officers involved were all immediately fired and charged with murder and aiding and abetting murder. This was done before any investigation has been done, and before the cause of death was even established.

The main officer involved, Derrick Chauvin was immediately tried, convicted, and hung. Not by a jury, but by the media. The media has so thoroughly convicted him that it is considered blasphemy of the highest order to even hint that he should be considered, “innocent until proven guilty”. The media has proclaimed it murder. Case closed!

Well once again I hate to spoil the show by introducing more facts into this media circus of lies, but here it goes.

According to the official Hennepin County Medical Examiner (not the private “examiner” paid for by the Floyd family legal team), George Floyd did not die from traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. The report stated that he died from a heart attack and the heart attack was a result of several factors. He had the narcotic Fentanyl in his system (which is 50 times more potent than heroin and the same drug that killed Prince), and he also had methamphetamines in his system. He also suffered from severe arteriosclerotic heart disease, and hypertension. All of that combined with his struggle with the police as they tried to subdue him is what caused him to go into cardiopulmonary arrest. Not just the fact that officer Chauvin had his knee on his neck. George Floyd received emergency medical care in the field, but he could not be resuscitated. Does that sound like murder to you? Read the report for yourself.

Also the knee on the neck (neck restraint) maneuver was not something that the Minneapolis police reserved for use only on black people. They have used it over 200 times since 2015 on anyone they needed to subdue of all colors, white, black, brown, or whatever, and no one has ever died from it. So why are the Black Lives Matter Network / media cabal screaming at the top of their lungs that this was racism? A racially motivated murder!

The Black Lives Matter Network / media cabal is not what it makes itself out to be. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be the liberal friends of African Americans, but in reality they are their mortal enemies. The policies that they so aggressively push cause nothing but more damage to the African American community.

Under the guise of eliminating racism they push a policy to “Defund the Police”. This is right on the front of the Black Lives Matter website.

Under the guise of eliminating racism they push a policy that they call, “Stop The Mass Incarcerations”. This is a policy that promotes the release of prison inmates before their time is up and putting them back on the street.

Under the guise of eliminating racism they push for the decriminalization of drugs offenses, and the immediate pardon of all drug offenses with reparations paid to those convicted of drug offenses.

So sum this up. In the African American community where there is the highest crime rate and the biggest problems with drug abuse, they push to release the inmates from prison and put them back on the streets, let drug use and drug dealing run wild, and then take away the police. What do you think the outcome of these policies will produce? More crime and drug abuse in the African American community. High crime and drug areas minus police equals hell, – easy math. Policies that promote more crime and drug abuse in the black community are what I call anti-black policies. These guys make the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) look like angels by comparison.

The  “liberal” media cabal (news, TV, movies, music, publications) who now are pretending to care so much about racism and black people have for decades pushed ideas that are very damaging to the African American community. They have promoted criminal sensibilities, thug life, promiscuity, and immorality to the African American community by way of their promotion of the worst aspects of rap / hip-hop culture. They’ve been actively promoting the very things that feed our problems. Like feeding poison to a sick man.

Here is a very timely quote from Malcolm X: “The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.”

What we are seeing happening in the world right now under the guise of “eliminating racism”, – the destabilization of society, the protest, rioting, looting, burning, and killing are not spontaneous, grass-roots events. It’s all thoroughly coordinated by those at the top of the Black Lives Matter / medial cabal. They are indeed the enemy of African Americans, but they are actually the enemy of us all. African Americans are just being used as cannon fodder in their game of global domination.

By: ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

You have recently joined a book club.

Before each meeting, one member of the literary collective sends an email to the club secretary offering a few thoughts on the assigned text. This month, it’s your turn to compose the brief review.

A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.

But if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the presumed race of your interlocutor.

This racial and political disparity is among the discoveries made by a pair of social psychologists in a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association. Cydney Dupree an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, documented what they call a “competence downshift” exhibited by white liberals in interactions with racial minorities, and with black people in particular.

The findings, based on what the authors stress is “preliminary evidence,” raise difficult questions about aspirations for a so-called post-racial society. The results reveal how subtle forms of discrimination may coincide with progress toward equal treatment, or what the paper identifies as “a significant reduction in the expression of explicit prejudice and endorsement of negative stereotypes.”

The psychologists further discovered that white liberals rarely admit to the goal of appearing less competent, a fact that highlights the role of implicit bias and “the covert nature of the competence downshift strategy.”

“White liberals may unwittingly draw on negative stereotypes, dumbing themselves down in a likely well-meaning, ‘folksy,’ but ultimately patronizing, attempt to connect with the outgroup,” argues the paper, titled “Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals.”AD

The findings could provide a new arrow in the quiver of those who decry identity politics practiced by liberals, and yet the paper hardly applauds conservatives for their approach, reasoning that they are simply “less motivated to affiliate with racial minorities.” In other words, the paper states, white conservatives “would not bother.”

“It’s somewhat counterintuitive,” said Dupree, who is the lead author and whose research was supported by the National Science Foundation as well as by Princeton’s Joint Degree Program in Social Policy. “The idea that people who are most well intentioned toward racial minorities, the people actually showing up and wanting to forge these connections, they’re the ones who seem to be drawing on stereotypes to do so.”

At the same time, she said, the findings are in line with what research has already concluded about the persistence of stereotypes even as more overt bias diminishes. What’s new is the paper’s focus on a population that has received less attention: people most likely to see themselves as allies of racial minorities.AD

White liberals, she said, may not endorse stereotypes painting black people “as lower status and less competent,” as the paper notes. But they’re nevertheless aware of these ideas, she explained, “and they may be using them to try to get along in a setting that we know is tricky — navigating an interaction with someone who’s different from you.”

The motive may be ingratiation, the paper suggests, since studies show that white liberals are “concerned about appearing racist,” as Dupree said. In their role as “impression managers,” white liberals may even take on the negative stereotypes they harbor toward people of other races, in an effort, as the paper puts it, to “get on their level.”

Their conservative counterparts, meanwhile, appear not to employ these stereotypes in the same way, as Dupree said, because, “we know empirically that white conservatives are less likely to be interested in getting along with racial minorities.” This became starkly evident to the behavioral psychologist when she turned to political campaign speeches for the first of several studies conducted to test whether political ideology shaped how white people presented themselves, on scales of competence and warmth, depending on the race of their audience.AD

In tracking the word choices made by white Republican and Democratic presidential candidates before white and black voters, her sample size was limited primarily by “the number of speeches in which Republican presidential candidates showed up for black audiences,” she said. The race of the audience was approximated by setting, at a black church for example, and by occasion, say the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

What she found, by performing online text analysis of 74 campaign speeches over the past 25 years, was that white candidates who were Democrats used significantly fewer words about “agency or power” and more about “affiliation and communality” when addressing minority voters. There was no significant difference exhibited by Republican candidates.

The irony, as the paper notes, is that “Whites who may be more affiliative toward Blacks alter their verbal responses toward them in a way that matches negative stereotypes. Despite the patronizing behavior that they enact, these liberal candidates may hold more goodwill toward minorities.”AD

Additional experiments fleshed out the effect. In these studies, participants were either undergraduate students recruited through Princeton’s Survey Research Center or users identified through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, or MTurk, a relatively low-cost source of subjects for experiments and other tasks. Political ideology was mostly measured by authoritarian values and belief in hierarchy, which researchers commonly use to assess political conservatism.

In the hypothetical situation of the book club, participants viewed a list of 24 pretested words and were asked to choose 12 to use in their email to the group’s secretary. Liberal participants included words “that would make them appear significantly less competent with a Black interaction partner than with a White one,” the study found, while conservative participants presented themselves as equally competent with a black and white partner. A related scenario, in which participants chose personality traits for themselves in an introductory email, provided the weakest evidence of a competence downgrade, which the authors reasoned could have been a product of a “less competence-focused task.”

Finally, in an interaction that participants presumed to be real, they viewed the first name of an online partner, and an avatar that the partner had apparently chosen to present, and then filled out a profile for themselves based on a set of available traits, such as honest, capable, ambitious and helpful. Once their profile was complete, they indicated how they hoped they would appear by ranking several descriptions, including kind, intelligent, fair and friendly.AD

Unlike in previous experiments, liberal whites indicated that their goal was to appear less competent with a black partner than with a white one. Conservatives betrayed no such goal. The final experiment also stood apart because it was presumed by participants to be real, whereas the others were clearly hypothetical. It also presented them with visual evidence of their partner’s race, while the others relied only on names.

Across the studies, the paper concludes, “liberals’ competence downshift is a subtle, but consistent effect.” At the same time, it acknowledges the difficulties of tracking subtle shifts in self-presentation, and calls for additional research that goes beyond online interactions. It says that future studies should strive for larger sample sizes.

Further examination is also required, Dupree said, to determine whether people make themselves appear less competent with any group whose approval they’re trying to earn. It might be worthwhile, for instance, to look at Asian Americans, she said, because they are less likely to be stereotyped as incompetent.

The studies controlled for the gender of speakers but not of their audience, Dupree said, meaning that there could be an additional difference, for example, if someone were speaking to a black man or a black woman.

The data doesn’t point to conclusions about whether the competence downshift is effective in smoothing fraught interactions. As the paper observes, the behavioral difference is subtle, and Dupree said it’s “possible that racial minorities don’t necessarily pick up on the shift.”

At the same time, she said, research shows that racial minorities are more concerned about being respected than about being liked. “They may be attuned to the possibility of being patronized,” she speculated.

Dupree said she was driven to conduct the research by a gap that she had identified while in graduate school in work on prejudice, which barely addressed people less likely to be biased against minorities. So, too, was she driven to explore topics that were “personally meaningful” to her.

“I will say that this was a topic I was and still am very much invested in,” she said. “While the result may seem counterintuitive to some, it may not be to others. I fully understand both reactions.”